Class Act

By Elissa Schappell

Published: January 16, 2005

PREP
By Curtis Sittenfeld.
406 pp. Random House. $21.95.

Seemingly bathed in a golden light of good fortune, the wealthy keep pieds-?terre, have trust funds that rival the gross national product of tiny African nations and, of course, are educated at the finest, most upper-crust prep schools. All this is known about the species. What isn't as widely known is what actual life is like behind the hushed, ivy-armored walls of America's elite prep schools. Not the repressive, secret-society-driven hothouse captured in ''Dead Poets Society,'' but life in your typical, sunny, everyday New England boarding school.

Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel, ''Prep,'' is a four-year, semester-by-semester tour of Ault, a fictional private boarding school in Massachusetts that's populated with boys and girls in khakis and blue blazers whose names alone identify them as spawn of the prosperous. After all, who but the affluent and flamboyantly well bred would dare saddle a child with names such as Tab or Aspeth, which sounds all too much like a lisped pronunciation of ''aspic.''

John Knowles wrote the seminal American boarding school bildungsroman, ''A Separate Peace'' (1960), which drew heavily on his own experience at Phillips Exeter, and gave rise to an entire class of coming-of-age at sleep-away-school books. But unlike ''A Separate Peace,'' ''Prep'' doesn't heave with poetic angst. Sittenfeld's heroine, Lee Fiora (while certainly classifiable as an alienated adolescent), possesses a Midwesterner's level head and a gimlet eye for all things top-drawer. It is Lee's observations of what it's like to be a scholarship student thrust into a world of privilege that shape the novel.

While Lee is obviously bright, her parents are confused as to why she'd want to leave Indiana, and her perfectly acceptable local high school, for an expensive private school on the East Coast. Despite what Lee tells her family, her desire to attend Ault has little to do with the three R's, and everything to do with the prospect of canoodling with a Weejun-wearing laddie.

''I'd pretended it was about academics, but it never had been. . . . I imagined that if I left South Bend, I would meet a melancholy, athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did and on overcast Sundays we would take walks together wearing wool sweaters.''

Upon arriving at Ault, Lee finds that life isn't as picturesque as she'd imagined. The reality is she isn't the teacher's pet. She isn't the smartest kid in the class. In fact, she pales in comparison with almost all her fellow students. She isn't the blond alpha girl whom you either want to be or be with; or the charming male sleepover-artist; or the popular, nonthreatening African-American guy; or the shy, high-achieving, suicidal Asian girl. Lee isn't despised or particularly well liked; she is no type. She is just Lee.

What Lee does excel at is disappearing into the wallpaper, hovering just on the fringes, watching, taking mental notes and sitting in judgment of her peers. Even as Lee's estrangement from her family back home grows, their differences magnified by the miles between them, she resists reaching out to her fellow students. She is determined to protect herself at all costs from any sort of awkwardness, passing up school dances and parties to stay in her dorm eating canned soup and paging through old Ault yearbooks.

There is never a moment when Lee entertains the notion that she might compete with her fellow students intellectually or financially, especially not those like the New York ''bank boys,'' the sons of Wall Street tycoons. Lee's father, a sweet, albeit obnoxious, man, owns a mattress franchise. That he bristles at Lee's embarrassment about her middle-class origins only deepens their estrangement. Lee quickly learns the old adage: Only no money and new money talk about money.

''Money is not discussed,'' she says. ''People have so much, so it's like nobody needs to mention it.'' Still, Lee, like any traveler in a foreign land, quickly learns to recognize the signs that differentiate one class from another.

''You can tell by people's rooms -- whether or not they have stereos, or if the girls have flowered bedspreads, or if they have silver picture frames. . . . And things like, you can send your laundry to a service or you do it yourself in the dorm machines. Or even some of the sports, how much the equipment costs. Ice hockey is a really expensive sport, but something like basketball isn't that much.''

It would be very easy to blame the school's not-so-subtle caste system for Lee's problems and unhappiness, but Sittenfeld doesn't. Lee is no saint, and no victim, but rather a willing cog in the machine of exclusion. She declines, for instance, to get involved with a kind and good-looking young man who works in the school kitchen because he's a townie. Gradually, however, Lee comes to acknowledge that it wasn't so much the fantasy of strolling hand in hand with some Camus-quoting lacrosse player that drew her to Ault, but her own desire to do better, to socially trade up.